Suicide chatrooms symptom of Japanese epidemic

14 October 2004 — 10:00am

With nine dead this week in suicide pacts, queues continued to form yesterday on Japanese internet bulletin boards set up to match people who share a fatal intent. "If you are considering suicide as I am, talk," a high school boy wrote yesterday on one site that contained 79 messages.

"I'm in my early 20s. I want to do it with briquettes or other easy way. I can go anywhere in Japan with a "shichirin" [a portable cooking stove] but I don't have a car or sleeping pills," wrote another, who asked that replies be headed "recruiting suicide".

The deaths on Tuesday of seven people, all in their teens or early 20s, in a minivan in bushland near Tokyo, and two more deaths in a second car not far away, are thought to be connected to these "suicide applicant" websites. With no evidence yet that the victims were related or had other common interests, police are investigating their emails and chatroom use.

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"We planned this together," one of the dead women wrote in her suicide note. "This was not a criminal incident." After ensuring the cars were airtight, the occupants tied themselves together by the wrists and were poisoned by the fumes from charcoal-burning stoves that they had lit inside. Some had also taken sleeping pills.

Thirty-four people died in group suicides last year, with 16 more this year. Two of the young women who died this week were among four involved in a pact that failed last week after police intervened. Charcoal-burning stoves, discussed in a lot of the chatroom messages, have featured in many of the group suicides.

Suicide is a national epidemic in Japan. Nine deaths at once seems shocking enough, but the reality is much worse: 94 people kill themselves every day. It is the highest rate in the developed world and one of the leading causes of death. Last year's total of 34,427 deaths, a record, was more than four times the number killed in road accidents.

About 75 per cent of the victims were men. The deaths often involve older people, particularly men who have been laid off from work, and in those cases financial ruin is frequently blamed. Unusually, Japan's life insurance companies pay out in cases of suicide which, when a family business or home is in jeopardy because of debts, allows a man to restore his reputation by sacrificing his life. The largest insurer, the Postal Life Insurance Service of Japan, said that it covered the deaths of 9334 people who committed suicide in 2002.

Suicide is seen as a legitimate and dignified solution to life's woes. Culturally it can be traced back to ancient samurai history, when death was seen as preferable to defeat. And in times of business failure, personal disgrace, debt, illness, school stress or relationship breakdown, large numbers of people opt for it.

This year the chairman of a company and his wife killed themselves after authorities blamed their chicken farm and egg distribution plant for an outbreak of bird flu.

National statistics record that household financial problems and illness were the reasons most often stated when a suicide note was left.

Though it is a problem of crisis proportions and a handful of psychiatrists have called for action, the Government has shown virtually no interest in suicide research or prevention, while the wider issue of depression is barely acknowledged as a health issue.